Tuesday April 08, 2003

PRIZES. The Pulitzers just came out and the Drama prize went to a guy named Nilo Cruz. No, I never heard of him either, but I don't doubt the wisdom of the Committee. Nilo's apparently a very young man, and associated with New Dramatists, at which a reading of one of my plays was given, once. Yeah, my career's taking off like a rocket.

But you know what last week's number-one movie was? "Phone Booth." It was written by Larry Cohen -- an old Hollywood hand responsible for "It's Alive," and "Black Caesar," and the great "Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover," a hallucinogenic biopic in which a sexually repressed young J. Edgar (James Wainwright), after a disastrous encounter with Ronee Blakely, turns into Broderick Crawford. Old song-and-dance man Dan Dailey plays Hoover's beloved Clyde Tolson with admirably repressed homosexual tension. Jose Ferrer, as Lionel McCoy, watches an anti-Vietnam demonstration in Washington and announces, in his best Jose Ferrer voice, "My God! It's like the goddamned Russian Revolution!" "You get the feeling," an imdb poster says, " you're being told this story by a gossipy wife under the hair dryer in a salon." Like that's a bad thing! Not to be missed.

Congratulations all around.